This paper explores the various South Slavic viewpoints regarding the legitimacy of the Ottoman rule expressed in Church Slavonic paratextual writings. Apart from the theologically-based view according to which the Ottoman rule was a tyranny sent by God as punishment for sin, some South Slavic writers, I argue, used a neutral voice, and even legitimized the rule of the Sultan. The wider political contexts in which these accounts were created, I suggest, were crucial for the ways in which the South Slavic chroniclers represented Ottoman power in the margins of their religious manuscripts.